San Francisco's Wooden Shjips play a minimal, droning brand of garage-styled psychedelia with a noticeable '60s Krautrock influence. Immediately I think of local bands The Priests or the Veins. The band's vocals slip beneath waves of throbbing minimal rhythms, while fuzztone guitar and shrieking organs jump to the foreground. When bandleader Ripley Johnson assembled the group in 2003, he wasn't interested in playing gigs or becoming famous; rather, his original intention was to find a group of non-musicians for the purposes of creating innovative music. On their Thrill Jockey debut, engineer Phil Manley (who handled the recording and mixing chores for Johnson's side project Moon Duo's latest album Mazes) was brought in, making this the first WS record to be cut in a proper studio. Mastering was farmed out to Sonic Boom and Heba Kadry. The end result is the most expansive Wooden Shjips album yet,full of the fuzzed-out, murky, and distorted excesses that are the band's trademarks. The San Francisco psychedelia that Johnson claims as his biggest influence takes a back seat to both the MC5 and Loop.
Wooden Shjips are very much sticking to their signature sound on West. Even with its increased focus on classic-rock virtues, the album isn't really a collection of riffs and wails and choruses; it's more a muscular sort of vibe-out-- badass ambient music, if you will. As hard as the band can rock, expansive nod-out music is still its focus, and the album works best when you give yourself over entirely to its pounding grandeur. Frontman Ripley Johnson sings in a narcoleptic mutter that never displays the slightest bit of feeling, and his numbed monotone never disturbs the mood by leaping out of the mix to grab you.
If you're as much a vinyl fetishist as I am, you'll be interested in getting a copy, as LPs straight from Thrill Jockey are a beautiful aqua hue!
Lend your ears to "Lazy Bones" here.
Buy your copy of Wooden Shjips' West here.
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